After the techno-futurism of the 1950s and the utopian 1960s vision of a “great society,” the 1970s saw Americans turning to the past as a source for both nostalgic escapism and serious reflection on the nation’s history. While some popular works like Grease presented the relatively recent past as a more innocent time, far away from the nation’s post-Vietnam, post-Watergate malaise, others like Roots used America’s bicentennial as an occasion for deep soul-searching. 
 
Happy Days investigates how 1970s popular culture was obsessed with America’s past but often offered radically different interpretations of the same historical events and icons. Even the figure of the greaser, once an icon of juvenile delinquency, was made family-friendly by Henry Winkler’s Fonzie at the same time that he was being appropriated in more threatening ways by punk and gay subcultures. The cultural historian Benjamin Alpers discovers similar levels of ambivalence toward the past in 1970s neo-noir films, representations of America’s founding, and neo-slave narratives by Alex Haley and Octavia Butler. By exploring how Americans used the 1970s to construct divergent representations of their shared history, he identifies it as a pivotal moment in the nation’s ideological fracturing. 

BENJAMIN L. ALPERS is a Reach for Excellence Associate Professor of History in the Honors College at the University of Oklahoma. He is the author of Dictators, Democracy, and American Public Culture: Envisioning the Totalitarian Enemy, 1920s–1950s.

"Alpers exhibits a fine facility for analyzing closely a wide range of revealing artifacts, including music, film criticism, and public commemoration. The result is a history of popular culture that productively probes the meanings of history itself, for individuals contending with personal identity, for scholars seeking to avoid easy generalizations, and for American society as a whole."— Joan Shelley Rubin, author of The Making of Middlebrow Culture

"In a lucid and entertaining volume, intellectual historian Ben Alpers' has offered us a rich and much-needed analysis of a decade too often portrayed as an 'age of innocence' that gave way to the more troubled 1960s and 1970s. Delivering nuanced readings of music, film, television, and popular politics, Alpers delivers not just a fresh take on the 1950s, but also demonstrates that nostalgia is a form of popular historical thinking, permitting Americans to accommodate the present by way of the past." 
 — Claire Bond Potter, author of Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics